"Those which I kept at my house near Colombo were chiefly fed upon plantains and bananas, but for nothing did they evince a greater partiality than the rose-coloured flowers of the red Hibiscus (_H. rosa-sinensis_). These they devoured with unequivocal gusto; they likewise relished the leaves of many other trees, and even the bark of a few of the more succulent ones. "A White Monkey, taken between Ambepusse and Kornegalle, where they are said to be numerous, was brought to me to Colombo. Except in colour, it had all the characteristics of _Presbytes cephalopterus_. So striking was its whiteness that it might have been conjectured to be an albino, but for the circumstance that its eyes and face were black. I have heard that White Monkeys have been seen near the Ridi-galle Wihara in the Seven Korales, and also at Tangalle; but I never saw another specimen. The natives say they are not uncommon, and Knox states that they are 'milk-white both in body and face: but of this sort there is not such plenty.' The Rev. R. Spence Hardy mentions, in his learned work on 'Eastern Monachism,' that on the occasion of his visit to the great temple of Dambool, he encountered a troop of White Monkeys {116}on the rock in which it is situated--which were, doubtless, a variety of the Wanderoo. Pliny was aware of the fact that White Monkeys are occasionally found in India. "When observed in their native wilds, a party of twenty or thirty of these creatures is generally busily engaged in the search for berries and buds. They are seldom to be seen on the ground, except when they may have descended to recover seeds or fruit which have fallen at the foot of their favourite trees. When disturbed, their leaps are prodigious; but, generally speaking, their progress is made, not so much by _leaping_, as by swinging from branch to branch, using their powerful arms alternately; and when baffled by distance, flinging themselves obliquely so as to catch the lower boughs of an opposite tree, the momentum acquired by their descent being sufficient to cause a rebound of the branch, that carries them up again, till they can grasp a higher and more distant one, and thus continue their headlong flight. In these perilous achievements, wonder is excited, less by the surpassing agility of these little creatures, frequently encumbered as they are by their young, which cling to them in their career, than by the quickness of their eye, and the unerring accuracy with which they seem almost to calculate the angle at which a descent will enable them to cover a given distance, and the recoil to attain a higher altitude." IX. PAITAN LANGUR. SEMNOPITHECUS SABANUS. _Semnopithecus sabanus_, Thomas, Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. (6), xii., p. 230, pl. vii. (head), (1893). PLATE XXXV. [Illustration: HOSE'S LANGUR.]